Many years ago, my co-working pal the Grape, WFMU addict, came rushing into my office saying that David
Newgarden, erstwhile morning DJ and music director, had
just played a version of SOME VELVET MORNING on the air
sung by computers and he had to get it. We called up the
station and got the particulars of the disc, which turned
out to be Computing Systems Quarterly Vol. 3 No. 2 from
Spring 1990. The Grape then spent months prowling Usenet
and making phone calls looking for this disk, and finally
got a copy. Persistence Pays Off. He gave me a dub.

There's a little more I can add, which is,
I sing sometimes with an act called the Loser's Lounge
(http://www.loserslounge.com)
and sang in the Lee Hazelwood tribute show a few years
ago (but not SVM, another twisted entry called Poet, Fool
or Bum). I passed a tape of Eddie and Eedie to Joe McGinty,
the organizer/pianist for the show and it was on his answering
machine for a few weeks - so it was back in its proper
medium!

Here are more details, from the man behind
the realization, Peter Langston.

Peter wrote, in an e-mail to me:

Thanks for your note and your interest.
I'm glad Eedie & Eddie and the Reggaebots are (still)
getting their due.

You should know that WFMU was partly responsible
for me creating that particular travesty in the first
place. Through a Bell Labs coworker who was helping
out at WFMU in his free time (Brian Redman) I learned
that WFMU was looking for the worst recording(s) of
all time. Although many people probably thought it should
be Nancy Sinatra singing Lee Hazelwood's song "These
Boots Are Made For Walking," I knew that Lee had
written an even more demented song that he had sung
WITH her in his hung-over cowboy voice! That was "Some
Velvet Morning" -- a song that alternates between
a caricature of a cowboy with the DTs and caricature
of a hippie flower child, while unable to decide whether
to be in 4/4 or in waltz time... Danger! Do not try
to dance to this song!

I'm not sure it made any sense to have
it be played in a reggae style, but the work I was doing
at Bellcore at that time was with computer programs
to assist in composing, arranging, and performing music,
with a little computer-controlled singing on the side,
and I had just come up with some nifty algorithms for
improvising reggae drum parts and reggae bass parts,
so...

At the time I was also running a telephone
demo that you could call up to hear samples of music
composed for you while-u-wait by the computers in my
lab. Most people called the mono telephone number that
gave you a monophonic mix of the stereo channels, but
you could also call either the left or right channel,
or both, one phone on each ear, to get stereo -- this
was how I worked from home. The elaborate phone connections
were from the telephone switch in Brian Redman's lab.

When the call would come in, the computers
in my lab would start composing the 6 or 7 pieces that
were played in the demo, while a voice synthesizer in
Brian's lab (Eedie) would accept the call (we paid the
long distance on a few collect calls from music researchers
in other parts of the world) and introduce the demo,
explaining what was going to happen, then the call would
be switched over to my lab where another voice synthesizer
(Eddie) would take over, introducing each piece as it
was played.

The idea for Eddie's voice came from the
overly-happy shipboard computer in the Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy radio serial. In the phone demo
Eddie would say something like:

Hi! This is Eddie! Your computer music
phone, FRIEND!
Oh BOY! You are rilly rilly going to like this music,
I can TELL!
[pause]
First, I'll just make sure that Peter's computer is
working,
and then we can share-and-ENJOY!

This is pretty much the kind of thing
that Douglas Adams' computer said, and he was named
Eddie, so we used Eddie as an homage. Then, when we
wanted the voice-synth that answers the phone in Brian's
lab to be female, we considered how, later in the Hitchhiker's
Guide, Zaphod Beeblebrox chooses a different personality
module for the computer and gets a worried old lady's
voice -- "This will all end in tears!" but
Adams never gives her a name, so I chose "Edie"
as a feminized "Eddie". Unfortunately, the
DECtalk voice synthesizer we were using pronounced E-d-i-e
just like E-d-d-i-e with a short E vowel "eh"
at the start, so we had to spell her name E-e-d-i-e
in order to get the long E initial vowel sound.

Anyway, the little chit-chat between Eedie
and Eddie at the beginning of the recording of Some
Velvet Morning is typical of the sillier moments in
the phone demo introductions, and is included as an
attempt to familiarize the listener with their strange
accents.